As consumers, we welcome Walmart's low prices. But they're doing the U.S. more harm than good. A new research report has found that low prices have actually caused unemployment to rise, and dealt a massive blow to the manufacturing sector.

Your Christmas shopping list may hold the key to future riches if you read it in a different light. It's not simply a checklist of needs coupled with a smattering of wants. It's also the key to finding the best stock deals of the holiday shopping season.

For most of the past decade, buying Oreos or Trident gum for your kids meant sending money to the Marlboro Man. Those brands have gone their separate ways, but there are still many odd matches in the wild world of conglomerates, where companies own siblings that don't really look like one another.

Wall Street's endless parade of buyouts and mergers, divisions and revisions has created a tangled landscape in which companies that are famous for one thing often own brands that are completely different -- or even diametrically opposed. Here are seven of our favorite mismatches.